The Democratic Mirage | A Critique of Democracy

As the lost desert wanderer drifts closer to death, they begin to have desperate visions. These visions are illusions called mirages, light rays that are bent and produce displaced images of distant objects and scenery.

Newborn sea turtles, confused by the lights of the businesses along the seafront, shimmy and scoot away from the ocean only to be eaten by crabs, get stuck in the sewer or smashed by cars and other vehicles. The false promise of the street lights, the literal beacons of civilization, leads them away from the water to their demise. One can imagine electric traps for mosquitoes and other insects having a similar allure.

This is how democracy has led the working class and working farmers away from seizing the means of production and taking political power for themselves.

Democracy is a subjective term. It’s a colloquialism that has no exact meaning; a mystifying degeneracy. It’s an umbrella term and a safe word, the use of which compels curious minds to reconcile numerous and often contradictory definitions. The way the global proletariat clings to democracy today is a clear sign of the the working class’ political immaturity and historical amnesia, which continues to exist in an era of ubiquitous Internet and information technologies.

For hundreds of years now, workers and farmers have been kept effectively powerless for the sake of “the profit motive”. We elect politicians who cater more to businesses and corporations than to the people they’re supposed to represent. Instead, we should remove the middle men and figure things out for ourselves together. The persistent distraction of perfecting democracy will not allow us to do that.

Democracy has only been and can only be part of a system of class rule where one class of people dominate, exploit and oppress another class. As farmers and workers, we don’t need “more” of it. We need anti-authoritarian communism. A healthy rejection of democracy is essential to pro-revolutionaries and the project of creating a classless society of freely associated people. It is every bit as essential as our rejections of patriarchy, racism, nationalism and authoritarianism.